The New York Times - USA (2020-10-26)

B6 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2020

trial early this year, and he tried
to deflect allegations against the
president in part by pointing to
Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine.
More recently, he has been work-
ing on the White House payroll
with a hazy portfolio, listed as “a
senior adviser to the president,”
and remains close to Jared Kush-
ner.
The three had pinned their
hopes for re-electing the presi-
dent on a fourth guest, a straight-
shooting Wall Street Journal
White House reporter named
Michael Bender. They delivered
the goods to him there: a cache of
emails detailing Hunter Biden’s
business activities, and, on
speaker phone, a former business
partner of Hunter Biden’s named
Tony Bobulinski. Mr. Bobulinski
was willing to go on the record in
The Journal with an explosive
claim: that Joseph R. Biden Jr.,
the former vice president, had
been aware of, and profited from,
his son’s activities. The Trump
team left believing that The Jour-
nal would blow the thing open,
and their excitement was con-
veyed to the president.
The Journal had seemed to be
the perfect outlet for a story the
Trump advisers believed could
sink Mr. Biden’s candidacy. Its
small-c conservatism in reporting
means the work of its news pages
carries credibility across the
industry. And its readership leans
further right than other big news
outlets. Its Washington bureau
chief, Paul Beckett, recently
remarked at a virtual gathering
of Journal reporters and editors
that while he knows that the
paper often delivers unwelcome
news to the many Trump sup-
porters who read it, The Journal
should protect its unique position
of being trusted across the politi-
cal spectrum, two people familiar
with the remarks said.
As the Trump team waited with
excited anticipation for a Journal
exposé, the newspaper did its
due diligence: Mr. Bender and
Mr. Beckett handed the story off
to a well-regarded China corre-
spondent, James Areddy, and a
Capitol Hill reporter who had
followed the Hunter Biden story,
Andrew Duehren. Mr. Areddy
interviewed Mr. Bobulinski. They
began drafting an article.
Then things got messy. Without
warning his notional allies, Rudy
Giuliani, the former New York
mayor and now a lawyer for
President Trump, burst onto the
scene with the tabloid version of
the McLean crew’s carefully laid
plot. Mr. Giuliani delivered a
cache of documents of question-
able provenance — but contain-
ing some of the same emails — to
The New York Post, a sister
publication to The Journal in
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Mr. Giuliani had been working with the former Trump aide Steve Bannon, who also began leaking some of the emails to favored right-wing outlets. Mr. Giuliani’s complicated claim that the emails came from a laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned, and his refusal to let some reporters examine the laptop, cast a pall over the story — as did The Post’s reporting, which alleged but could not prove that Joe Biden had been involved in his son’s activities. While the Trump team was clearly jumpy, editors in The Journal’s Washington bureau were wrestling with a central question: Could the documents, or Mr. Bobulinski, prove that Joe Biden was involved in his son’s lobbying? Or was this yet another story of the younger Mr. Biden trading on his family’s name — a perfectly good theme, but not a new one or one that needed urgently to be revealed before the election. Mr. Trump and his allies ex- pected the Journal story to appear Monday, Oct. 19, according to Mr. Bannon. That would be late in the campaign, but not too late — and could shape that week’s news cycle heading into the crucial final debate last Thursday. An “important piece” in The Journal would be coming soon, Mr. Trump told aides on a confer- ence call that day. His comment was not appreci- ated inside The Journal. “The editors didn’t like Trump’s insinuation that we were being teed up to do this hit job,” a Journal reporter who wasn’t directly involved in the story told me. But the reporters continued to work on the draft as the Thurs- day debate approached, indiffer- ent to the White House’s frantic timeline. Finally, Mr. Bobulinski got tired of waiting. “He got spooked about whether they were going to do it or not,” Mr. Bannon said. At 7:35 Wednesday evening, Mr. Bobulinski emailed an on-the- record, 684-word statement making his case to a range of news outlets. Breitbart News published it in full. He appeared the next day in Nashville to attend the debate as Mr. Trump’s surprise guest, and less than two hours before the debate was to begin, he read a six-minute statement to the press, detailing his allegations that the former vice president had involvement in his son’s business dealings. When Mr. Trump stepped on stage, the president acted as though the details of the emails and the allegations were common knowledge. “You’re the big man, I think. I don’t know, maybe you’re not,” he told Mr. Biden at some

point, a reference to an ambigu- ous sentence from the documents. As the debate ended, The Wall Street Journal published a brief item, just the stub of Mr. Areddy and Mr. Duehren’s reporting. The core of it was that Mr. Bobulinski had failed to prove the central claim. “Corporate records re- viewed by The Wall Street Jour- nal show no role for Joe Biden,” The Journal reported. Asked about The Journal’s handling of the story, the editor in chief, Matt Murray, said the paper did not discuss its news gathering. “Our rigorous and trusted journalism speaks for itself,” Mr. Murray said in an emailed statement. And if you’d been watching the debate, but hadn’t been obses- sively watching Fox News or reading Breitbart, you would have had no idea what Mr. Trump was talking about. The story the Trump team hoped would upend the campaign was fading fast.

The gatekeepers return The McLean group's failed at- tempt to sway the election is partly just another story reveal- ing the chaotic, threadbare qual- ity of the Trump operation — a far cry from the coordinated “disinformation” machinery feared by liberals. But it’s also about a larger shift in the American media, one in which the gatekeepers appear to have returned after a long ab- sence. It has been a disorienting couple of decades, after all. It all began when The Drudge Report, Gawker and the blogs started telling you what stodgy old news- papers and television networks wouldn’t. Then social media brought floods of content pouring over the old barricades. By 2015, the old gatekeepers had entered a kind of crisis of confidence, believing they could- n’t control the online news cycle

any better than King Canute could control the tides. Television networks all but let Donald Trump take over as executive producer that summer and fall. In October 2016, Julian Assange and James Comey seemed to drive the news cycle more than the major news organizations. Many figures in old media and new bought into the idea that in the new world, readers would find the information they wanted to read — and therefore, decisions by editors and producers, about whether to cover something and how much attention to give it, didn’t mean much. But the last two weeks have proved the opposite: that the old gatekeepers, like The Journal, can still control the agenda. It turns out there is a big difference between WikiLeaks and establishment media coverage of Wiki- Leaks, a difference between a Trump tweet and an article about it, even between an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal sug- gesting Joe Biden had done bad things, and a news article that didn’t reach that conclusion. Perhaps the most influential media document of the last four years is a chart by a co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, Yochai Benkler. The study showed that a dense new right- wing media sphere had emerged — and that the mainstream news “revolved around the agenda that the right-wing media sphere set.” Mr. Bannon had known this, too. He described his strategy as “anchor left, pivot right,” and even as he ran Breitbart News, he worked to place attacks on Hillary Clinton in mainstream outlets. The validating power of those outlets was clear when The New York Times and Washington Post were given early access in the spring of 2015 to the book “Clinton Cash,” an investigation of the Clinton family’s blurring of business, philanthropic and politi-

cal interests by the writer Peter Schweizer. Mr. Schweizer is still around this cycle. But you won’t find his work in mainstream outlets. He’s over on Breitbart, with a couple of Hunter Biden stories this month. And the fact that Mr. Bobulin- ski emerged not in the pages of the widely respected Journal but in a statement to Breitbart was essentially Mr. Bannon’s nightmare, and Mr. Benkler’s fondest wish. And a broad array of mainstream outlets, unpersuaded that Hunter Biden’s doings tie directly to the former vice president, have largely kept the story off their front pages, and con- fined to skeptical explanations of what Mr. Trump and his allies are claiming about his opponent. “SO USA TODAYDIDN’T WANT TO RUN MY HUNTER BIDEN COLUMN THIS WEEK,” the conservative writer Glenn Reynolds complained Oct. 20, posting the article instead to his blog. President Trump himself hit a wall when he tried to push the Hunter Biden narrative onto CBS News. “This is ‘60 Minutes,’ and we can’t put on things we can’t verify,” Lesley Stahl told him. Mr. Trump then did more or less the same thing as Mr. Reynolds, posting a video of his side of the interview to his own blog, Face- book. The media’s control over information, of course, is not as total as it used to be. The people who own printing presses and broad- cast towers can’t actually stop you from reading leaked emails or unproven theories about Joe Biden’s knowledge of his son’s business. But what Mr. Benkler’s research showed was that the elite outlets’ ability to set the agenda endured in spite of social media. We should have known it, of course. Many of our readers, screaming about headlines on Twitter, did. And Mr. Trump knew it all along — one way to read his endless attacks on the establishment media is as an expression of obsession, a form of love. This week, you can hear howls of betrayal from people who have for years said the legacy media was both utterly biased and totally irrelevant.

“For years, we’ve respected and even revered the sanctified position of the free press,” wrote Dana Loesch, a right-wing com- mentator not particularly known for her reverence of legacy media, expressing frustration that the Biden story was not getting attention. “Now that free press points its digital pen at your throat when you question their preferences.”

On the other side of the gate There’s something amusing — even a bit flattering — in such earnest protestations from a right-wing movement rooted in efforts to discredit the independ- ent media. And this reassertion of control over information is what you’ve seen many journalists call for in recent years. At its best, it can also close the political land- scape to a trendy new form of dirty tricks, as in France in 2017, where the media largely ignored a last-minute dump of hacked emails from President Emmanuel Macron’s campaign just before a legally mandated blackout period. But I admit that I feel deep ambivalence about this revenge of the gatekeepers. I spent my career, before arriving at The Times in March, on the other side of the gate, lobbing information past it to a very online audience who I presumed had already seen the leak or the rumor, and seeing my job as helping to guide that audience through the thicket, not to close their eyes to it. “The media’s new and unfamiliar job is to provide a framework for un- derstanding the wild, unvetted, and incredibly intoxicating information that its audience will inevitablysee — not to ignore it,” my colleague John Herrman (also now at The Times) and I wrote in 2013. In 2017, I made the decision to publish the unverified “Steele dossier,” in part on the grounds that gatekeepers were looking at it and influenced by it, but keeping it from their audience. This fall, top media and tech executives were bracing to re- fight the last war — a foreign- backed hack-and-leak operation like WikiLeaks seeking to influ- ence the election’s outcome. It was that hyper-vigilance that led Twitter to block links to The New York Post’s article about Hunter Biden — a frighteningly dispro- portionate response to a story that other news organizations were handling with care. The schemes of Mr. Herschmann, Mr. Passantino and Mr. Schwartz weren’t exactly WikiLeaks. But the special nervousness that many outlets, including this one, feel about the provenance of the Hunter Biden emails is, in many ways, the legacy of the Wiki- Leaks experience. I’d prefer to put my faith in Mr. Murray and careful, professional journalists like him than in the social platforms’ product manag- ers and executives. And I hope Americans relieved that the gatekeepers are reasserting themselves will also pay attention to who gets that power, and how centralized it is, and root for new voices to correct and chal- lenge them.

Inside Trump Allies’ Last-Ditch Failed Plan to Alter the Election Narrative

FROM FIRST BUSINESS PAGE

At Thursday’s debate, the president acted as though the details of the unsubstantiated allegations against his rival were common knowledge.

ERIN SCHAFF/THE NEW YORK TIMES

In the final stretch of the 2020
campaign, right-leaning news
sites with millions of readers have
published dozens of false or mis-
leading headlines and articles
that effectively back unsubstanti-
ated claims by President Trump
and his allies that mail-in ballots
threaten the integrity of the elec-
tion.
The Washington Examiner,
Breitbart News, The Gateway
Pundit and The Washington
Times are among the sites that
have posted articles with head-
lines giving weight to the conspir-
acy theory that voter fraud is
rampant and could swing the elec-
tion to the left, a theory that has
been repeatedly debunked by
data.
On Sept. 25, Gateway Pundit
posted an article headlined “EX-
CLUSIVE: California Man Finds
THOUSANDS of What Appear to
be Unopened Ballots in Garbage
Dumpster — Workers Quickly Try
to Cover Them Up — We are
Working to Verify.” The envelopes
turned out to be empty and dis-
carded legally in 2018. Gateway
Pundit later updated the headline,
but not before its original specula-
tion had gone viral.
The Right Scoop published an
article on Oct. 7 headlined “DE-
STROYED: Tons of Trump mail-in
ballot applications SHREDDED
in back of tractor-trailer headed
for Pennsylvania.” The material
was actually printing waste from
a direct mail company. The publi-
cation later changed the headline
to reflect that the claim had been
debunked.
Another right-wing site, Daily
Wire, posted a Sept. 24 article
about ballots in Pennsylvania un-
der the headline “FEDS: Military
Ballots Discarded in ‘Troubling’
Discovery. All Opened Ballots
were Cast for Trump.” Headlines
on the same issue in The Washing-
ton Times were similar: “Feds in-
vestigating discarded mail-in bal-
lots cast for Trump in Pennsylva-
nia” and “FBI downplays election
fraud as suspected ballot issues
found in Pennsylvania, Texas.” A
Washington Times opinion piece

on the matter had the headline “Trump ballots in trash, oh my.” Several days after the reports, neither Daily Wire nor The Wash- ington Times appeared to follow up with articles on the announce- ment from Pennsylvania’s elec- tions chief that the discarded ballots were a “bad error” by a sea- sonal contractor, not “intentional fraud.” Mr. Trump cited the discarded Pennsylvania ballots several times as an example of fraud, including in last month’s presidential debate. Major polls have shown Mr. Trump lagging the Democratic presidential nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., in an election that will have significantly more people than usual voting by mail because of the coronavirus. False claims about mail-in voting have been a staple of the president’s campaign. At last month’s debate, he claimed without evidence, “This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen.” In June, Mr. Trump posted on Twitter that “Mail-In Ballots will lead to a RIGGED ELECTION!” He linked to a Breitbart article that included a transcript of Attor- ney General William P. Barr’s telling the Fox News host Maria Bartiromo that voting by mail “ab- solutely opens the floodgates to fraud.” In August, The New York Post published an article that relied on one anonymous source, identified as a Democratic operative, who claimed that he had engaged in voter fraud for decades. The Blaze, Breitbart, Daily Caller, FoxNews.com and The Washing- ton Examiner posted their own versions of the article. It was also promoted by Donald Trump Jr. and his brother Eric, the Trump campaign’s communications team, the “Fox & Friends” television program and Tucker Carl- son’s Fox News show, according to a recent Harvard University study. The Harvard researchers described a “propaganda feedback loop” in right-wing media. The au- thors of the study, published this month through the school’s Berk-

man Klein Center for Internet and Society, reported that popular news outlets, rather than social media platforms, were the main drivers of a disinformation campaign meant to sow doubts about the integrity of the election. So far in October, Breitbart has published nearly 30 articles with the tag “voter fraud.” President Trump has posted links to several Breitbart articles on Twitter, including one in August in which a Republican-appointed poll chal- lenger estimated that up to 20,000 absentee primary ballots had been improperly counted in De- troit, a city “known for voting heavily Democrat,” the article said. The Detroit News later reported that election officials in Michigan said the problems “weren’t examples of fraud and don’t call into question the integrity of the results.” The voting system, stressed by greater demand in a pandemic,

has struggled in places with ballots sent to incorrect addresses or improperly filled out. But intentional voter fraud is extremely un- common and rarely organized, according to decades of research. That’s true even though specific totals vary depending on the source. Among the billions of votes cast from 2000 to 2012, there were 491 cases of absentee-ballot fraud, according to an investigation conducted at Arizona State University’s journalism school. Election experts have calculated that, in a 20-year period, fraud in- volving mailed ballots has af- fected 0.00006 percent of individ- ual votes, or one case per state every six or seven years. In June, The Washington Post and the nonprofit Electronic Reg- istration information Center ana- lyzed data from three vote-by- mail states and found 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of dead people in 2016 and

2018, or 0.0025 percent of the 14.6 million mailed ballots. Some conservative publications have nodded at the scarcity. In an Oct. 1 article about Face- book’s bans of ads that promote a narrative of widespread voter fraud, The Blaze noted “isolated reports of voter fraud in America in recent months.” A Fox News article on the same day pointed out a “false claim” by Mr. Trump that a mail worker in West Virginia had sold ballots. The Fox News article quoted a state official who said the incident had never happened. Mr. Trump’s effort to discredit mail-in voting follows decades of disinformation about voter imper- sonation, voting by noncitizens and double voting, often promoted by Republican leaders. Voting by mail under normal circumstances does not appear to give either major party an advantage, according to a study this spring by Stanford University’s

Institute for Economic Policy Re- search. But many conservative outlets have promoted the idea that fraud could tip the scales in favor of Democrats. Stephen J. Stedman, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Insti- tute for International Studies at Stanford, said he thought “about disinformation in this country as almost an information ecology — it’s not an organic thing from the bottom up.” Last month, sites including The Gateway Pundit, The Washington Examiner and Breitbart followed a report from a Fox affiliate in Wisconsin about mail that had been found in a ditch and report- edly included absentee ballots. The story was promoted by the Trump adviser Jason Miller; the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany; the Fox News host Tucker Carlson; and the president himself. After the outcry, all but unno- ticed, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that the batch of mail hadn’t included absentee ballots from Wisconsin and that it was unclear if there had been ballots from other states. In a similar cycle, the Fox News host Sean Hannity and conservative publications magnified the reach of a deceptive video re- leased last month by Project Veri- tas, a group run by the conservative activist James O’Keefe. The video claimed without named sources or verifiable evidence that the campaign for Representa- tive Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, was collecting ballots illegally. Mr. Stedman said right-leaning outlets sometimes conflated fraud with the statistically insignificant administrative mishaps that oc- cur in every American election. “The pandemic is making this a true administrative nightmare, where administrators who have never done this on this scale have just a few months to do it, and they now also have the Trump adminis- tration trying to take advantage of every single mistake to say, ‘See, that’s fraud,’ ” Mr. Stedman said. “It can’t end well.”

False Voter Fraud Stories Are Churning on Conservative News Sites

By TIFFANY HSU

A poll worker in Westchester, Florida. A disinformation campaign against mail-in voting relies more on right-wing news outlets like The Blaze, Breitbart and Daily Caller than on social media, Harvard researchers determined.

SAUL MARTINEZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

MEDIA

.

The New York Times - USA (2020-10-26)

Get our desktop app

Company

Features

Documentation

Resources